SNM021: Controlling Time

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controlling time on today's episode of Serve No Master. Today's episode is brought to you by Social Pilot. The social media and marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses joined over 20,000 social media pros at serve. No master dot com Backslash social pilot today Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. When I was in high school, I wasn't chubby, nerdy kid. Played a lot of video games, has been a lot of time at home. I was on the debate team. I wasn't a natural athlete. I didn't really enjoy sports. I didn't really fit in with the sports teams, but I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to be fit. I started going to the gym, started go to the gym, my school later I went to the gym at the Y M. C. A. I tried different things and I would go there without knowing what to do. There's all these machines. There's all these different rules for each machines. There's a structure for reps and all these things you're supposed to do. And if you don't know that you don't know what you're doing, you can waste a lot of time. I used to go to the gym and I'd be there for 234 hours in the summer, and I wouldn't get that much done. When you don't have a plan, it's very easy to waste a lot of time. I see people like this all the time. They go to the gym and work out takes two hours instead of 40 minutes. They throw a huge about a time in the toilet because they're hanging out there. Haven't snacks are talking to other people? I realize now that for many people, gyms have become a social place. It's a place to flirt with other people. It's a place to hang out. They've got a juice bar, they have other elements. They're very social. We end up spending huge amounts of time very inefficiently. Think about how much time you lose. If you spend two hours at the gym Monday through fighting, it's 10 hours. If you're distant, a 40 minute workout, six hours of your life you'd get back every week. That's a huge amount of time. The Maur time we can get back, the more efficient you could become, the better time is your most valuable and precious resource, and I want to help you get back more time. There's a reason this isn't a one hour podcast. I try to keep episodes under 24 minutes long. Oftentimes, I'm able to give you the entire message in less than 20 minutes, and I consider that a win. The quicker I can give you valuable information, the better, because your time is valuable and I don't want to waste your time. I want to give you really good information very quickly. Efficiency is value the more free time you have, the better. You don't want to be one of those casual Jim people when dealing with your new business with dealing with your approach to building a block, growing a business, becoming a writer, working online, becoming affiliate market or whatever online business you're moving into, the more efficient you can become the better. Recently I was writing review of the software Graham early. I've mentioned it a few times in recent Post. That's cause I'm really excited about using it, and I use it a lot. I was writing my extensive review, and in the middle of writing my review about Graham early, I got a message on Skype from one of the people that I write with. He wanted me to take a script he'd written and turn it into a Power Point presentation, then recorded as a video for him. Really quick job to copy each line one line at a time. You copy one sentence from the word document that pasted into power 10.3 different sections to tell it. Don't copy over the four men and keep the four. Mining for power Point was taking a lot of time, and it was annoying. I then copy the word document into Graham early and then copy from Graham early into the Power point, and I could just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, one click one click, one click. It tripled. My speed tripled my efficiency, and that's something I got really excited about. I wrote three paragraphs about it in my review of Graham early because I found this other way of using the tool the way that that toe works. It doesn't keep any formatting. So when you copied into something else, it grabs the formatting of where you've released it. I love that. That's very valuable to me. It's a simple little thing, but it's an example of saving time. All the tools I talked about, the techniques and approaches I discuss through all about gaining as much time as possible. I'm all about efficiency. The faster you finish a project, the more money you could make doing more work. Or you can use that additional time is free. Time to spend with your family, your loved ones. Following your passions, exploring your hobbies. We become inefficient, whether it's at the gym or at work, when we have no goals and no structure. Most of the training I've been sharing with you throughout this podcast, Siri's and Into the Future, is all about providing a structure and a series of goals in front of you. Early on, when talking about the mathematics of success. We developed a specific financial goal that you need to hit so you can quit your job. We have a very specific number. I cover this in my book as well. If you haven't set up a specific goal, you should consider going back and listening to that lesson. Without that goal, I can promise you you will never achieve success. If you can't be fastidious and the very small things in the five minute tasks, how can you possibly trust yourself to do the big tasks? A specific goal, plus a specific date is the formula for success of a goal will lead to nothing. Everyone goes on diets and the reason 99% of diets fail is lack of goal and lack of time people. Every New Year's say. This year I'm gonna lose weight. That is a meaningless sentence. Unless you have a specific number attached to your goal in a specific date. There's no motivation to hit it. If you say I'm gonna lose weight this year, if you lose a pound, you've won. If you say I'm going to lose £10 this year, you could lose £1 a month for the next 10 months and decide that you've won take you a whole year. But it's loose. It's too loose. If you say I'm gonna lose £10 by March 1st, suddenly you have a goal you construct your to you say to yourself, I have 60 days, even a little less than 60 days to lose this much weight. That means I need to lose 1/60 of the weight every single day to get there. Having a specific date and a specific goal allows us to chop up our tasks into smaller pieces. I've been losing weight for more than a year now, and I still have a ways to go because I need to lose from the beginning around £100 I'm about halfway there. It's a very long term goal. It's very hard to every day focus on losing weight, so I have to put specific tasks in front of me. Every day I ride my exercise bike with my kids that hang out with me on the balcony, and I ride every day for at least 20 minutes. I'm trying to push it. Lately, it's been 25 trying to get up to 30 minutes and push myself as hard as I can in the hot sun seven days a week to make sure that I have something in my life that help me lose weight. I also don't have any snacks in the house and these other elements to help me hit my goals. But we need small, manageable pieces to help us work towards a goal. If we don't have miniature tasks, we can't succeed and we can't develop. Our small, tiny tasks are daily goals. Unless we have our long term specific goal, your time is worth much more than money. Nobody on their deathbed asks for more money. They asked for more time, no matter how rich you are. When your time is up, it's up. Your time is so precious and so valuable. And that's why it means so much to me that you're willing to spend time with me every day or every once in a while. Listening to these episodes, it's really the ultimate compliment. To give someone your time is the ultimate compliment, and it means a lot to me. It shows me that you care about my message and it gives me an obligation to use your time wisely and be valuable in the information I give you. For this reason, we want to use your time with maximum efficiency, and I want to give you a couple of more advanced tools to help you get there. Now that we have a little bit of the big picture, let's get into the nitty grade. The first technique that you might consider is the Pomodoro technique. If you've read my book, if you've been to my block, you may have seen me mention this before. I personally don't use the Pomodoro technique because of the way my brain a structured. It doesn't work for me personally, but my next door neighbor who makes a lot of money and it's very successful. His online business swears by it. You need to try several different time management techniques to find the one that works best for you and for your personality and for your structure. I have a whole series of steps I go into at the start of each day to help me be very efficient and to avoid, during certain task that distract me the Pomodoro technique. There's a couple of variations, but you divide your day up into 20 minute blocks, and for each task on your list, you assign a number of blocks, and I believe you can only sign two or four blocks to a specific test. There's a certain amount of time and has the whole structure of her off, and you need to take breaks and all of these wonderful things and really provides a lot of rigidity to your tasks. When you're working on a task, you say, I need to write a block post. If you have a time or next to you and you know you have 20 minutes to finish the block post, you'll finish in 20 minutes. But if you don't have the time, Rick, it might take you two hours If you're a person who can get caught up in distraction and finishes tasks to slowly and could take too long for something. This technique might be very valuable for you being very strict and structure about your time, and I recommend trying it. I don't personally use it, but I do think it's perfect for a lot of people and that's why I share it with you having a tight schedule having these tiny tasks leads to more success. So even with small goals, having your goal and having a deadline means you'll hit that goal. The reason so many people have 1/2 written book or an unpublished novel and every Los Angeles has half finished scrapped is because there's no end date. If you took any person Los Angeles, walk up to any of those people who has a script, they haven't finished and say, kidnapped your family and 30 days, your family be dead. If you don't finish that script, guess what? Suddenly they'll finish the script. It's not lack of ability. It's lack of motivation and lack of a clear goal. When you put that firm go in front of them and the deadline, suddenly they become capable of completing the task. All of the excuses disappear when you force a task up their priority tree. When you attach riel word consequences to failure, then the effort level changes the reason most people don't finish their book. It's not that important because they haven't set a firm goal. If you say to yourself, I want my first book published in the next 90 days and you put stickers on the wall. You post on Facebook to tell your friends your books coming out, you announce that the book is coming out. You create social pressure to motivate yourself to success. This will accelerate how fast you work and you'll become more efficient with small and big tasks. Put the goal in front of you. Set a timer. Whether it's a goal you want to finish in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. Put a date on each of your goals, each of your dreams, another tool that I find very useful. Task managers. I've tried a lot of different ones. There are a lot of really great software out there that many people use, and I've worked with a lot of different clients, partners and projects where people use different project management software. My personal favorite and other people hate it, but my personal favorites called Reich. That's W R I K e. I'll put a link in the show notes. I like it because you can put tasks on a calendar and you can look at what you'll be working on every day for the next 90 days. Six months, however long you set it out it gives you these really cool bar graphs. Maybe other project Minute software's out there do that as well. But that's what I like about this piece of kit. What? I'm working with someone on a project. This is what I like to use. I really enjoy checkmark motivation. I enjoy micro loops and micro goals. This is where you break up a tasking do the smallest piece is possible, and each time I finish the task. I get to collect that little check mark and it disappears because I finished it, and that makes me feel good. Pomodoro technique doesn't work that well for me, but this technique that almost seems a little bit childlike and very video game like and I think that's why I respond to it. Modern video games are pretty much unusable. When I was a kid at a Nintendo way back in 1986 when the first home video game systems after the Atari Siris on the original Super Mario Brothers, you got three lives and you would jump through nine levels, and if he died three times, you were over and you had to start out at the very beginning, you had to start from scratch. Games are no longer like that. Most games now auto save, and you only go back five minutes. They don't make games anymore. Where if you die, you've undone five hours of work. You have to start from scratch. We have a society and culture of video game culture where there's tons of tiny little tasks that designed to make you feel good along the way. Lots of these sweeping science fiction and fantasy video games where you're traveling around the universe or around some mystical kingdom fighting enemies with swords or lasers, and you have to collect different materials. You have to collect different flowers or gold or different metals to make weapons. They have these little tasks along the way because it's very effective in getting people to engage with the video games. I don't know if these video game makers have figured out how the mind works or my mind has been programmed by them. But I do know having a series of tiny tasks in front of me is something I enjoy, and I respond to very well if I have a list of check marks, all I want to do is check off is many of them as I can as fast as I can. That works for me, and it makes me faster. Part of the problem people run into is the mindset. If you approach your blog's your next project, whatever you're working on as a hobby, if you see these podcasts is entertainment, you will limit yourself. When we see something is entertainment, we don't take it that seriously. It's not that important. It never achieves priority status in our mind and environmental goals. If I'm just a hobby for you, I'm someone fun to listen to. And I appreciate that. If you like my voice, if you like hearing some island stories, and in the next episode we're gonna talk about living in paradise a little bit, kind of take a little attack and talk about how much I love living where I live and how I got here. Sometimes it's just about living vicariously through me, and that's fine. I appreciate that. That's a comp it, but I want more from you. I want you to be in the business mindset. When you treat what you're doing like a business, you treat your money like an expense. When you buy a movie ticket, you don't expect to get your money back. But when you buy a program that teaches you how to make money, you expect to get your money back if you treat it like a business. We talked about this in some previous episodes, talking about mindset, talking about escaping the cubicle mindset, and this is important. So taking that idea to the next level when you're working on a little task. If you feel like your block is your hobby, then you'll be very casual your work on things slowly. But if it's how you make a living, if it's how you feed your kids, you will find true efficiency in my course words to profit mastery. I teach how to write e books and articles in the non fiction realm in the how to realm for clients customers in yourself very quickly and also teach how to find clients that pay you a lot of money right now. The going rate and this may change if your listeners in the future, but right now they're going rate for a block post is around $35. If you ride a block post for someone, and you get paid directly without a middleman, you can expect to make around $35 per block post. If you have to feed your kids with your block posts, you will become fast and efficient. And you will work really hard because you have the motivation of taking care of your family. Making that money. It's a necessary thing If your monthly goal is $10,000 a month, making $35 riding block post isn't gonna get you to your goal. You're on a different path, and it's gonna be a little bit different for you. But imagine needing that money. If you need it, then you'll do it. Your motivation will be different, depending upon your knees and your goals. Treating this like a business treating your time with me like business training will change the way you approach things, and you will become more efficient, more effective with your time. I love relaxing. I love entertainment. I have a lot of hobbies. I love reading. I love Listen into a couple of other podcasts. I mostly listen to bad movie podcasts, but I like listen to them. I like reading books all the time. I like spending time with my kids. I like watching movies with my kids. I have tons of outdoor hobbies, which I talk about all the time, and I talked about more tomorrow. There are so many things I love doing that I want to be as efficient as possible with my work time. A little bit of efficiency can cost you an hour, a day, every day. You just lose an hour to waste the time over a week. That's five hours a week over a month. That's 20 hours over year. That's more than 100 hours, weeks and weeks of time. You can get back simply by being a little more efficient and starts with having the right mindset. This is a business podcast. This isn't a non adventure fantasy podcast. This is about finding a path to change in your life. That's my goal. I'm so heavily invested in that that's my dream for you. And efficiency is gonna get you there. There are a couple of other time tools. In addition to Pomodoro, in addition to task Manager's like Reich when you're working, put yourself on the work mindset and start to track the mistakes you make. What is your bad hobby? What is your inefficiency? There are a couple of things that everyone does that you will need to change. How much do you check Facebook or other social media? The only reason I even use Facebook is that two or three people I work with only talk to me through there. They only use Facebook chat. They don't use Skype, which is my primary mode of communication. Otherwise, I would probably check Facebook once a week. I'm not really a Facebook addict. A couple of years ago, there was a video game was playing on Facebook while it's been hours being mindless, but I broke into that habit. So for me, my temptation is Maur that I'll get lost reading some block post or reading some of the newspapers that I follow online and time will fade away. I'm not a big fan of reading the news and that I don't think it's very useful. But sometimes they get caught up, even though it doesn't affect my life at all. Even though nothing in the newspaper will actually affect me, I get caught reading all these stories. That's my personal time ways. I've tried to quit, but it doesn't work for me very well. So instead, I've just tried to cut myself down to about 20 minutes a day of news. I get through 20 minutes and then I'm out. You may find other areas where you have a problem. Maybe you can't stop reading a blogged, watching movies on Netflix, watching YouTube videos, whatever your thing is, work on cutting it down. I'm working on my efficiency. I've beating the social media bug. I've done my best against news. Maybe one day I'll get to zero. The other thing that destroys a lot of time is email. There are certain people, and they did a recent study. They found that some people waste as much as six hours of every workday with email. In fact, most people that's the average. The average American worker spends six hours a day messing around email. The solution is very simple. Jack Remo one today said, a specific window where you check your email, let people know you can send a message that responds to every e mail you get and simply says, thank you so much for email. I only check email once a day. I check my email every day between seven and nine AM Eastern, and that's when you could expect me reply to this message very simple. What this does is it keeps people from getting annoyed if you take too long to reply, and then it sets the expectation problem solved. The idea that need to respond to email immediately is false. I used to be so bad about this. I have so many email accounts that are active for all my different projects, everything I'm working on. At one time, I had 25 active email addresses. They were all connected to my iPhone, all connected to my laptop. All kept my desktop everywhere I went. Every time an email came into any of those accounts, my phone would bus. My email became my master and it was destroying me. It took me a long time to fight my way to where I am right now. I checked my email every day. Morning, my time, which is probably evening your time. I don't check my email throughout the day. If I'm in the middle of an important campaign, then for a few days I might check my email two times a day or even three times a day, but only for a few days every couple of months at most 99% of the time. I checked my e mail in the morning that I log out of the program and I don't check it again till the next day. This has given me back a huge amount of time. Take control of your email. Don't let it control you. It's never an emergency. How many times have you gotten emails? Someone says it's an emergency, you reply, and they don't reply to the next day. Anyways, it's on Lian emergency when they're waiting for your reply, but not when it's their turn. Don't get caught up in that set. Expectations, and the problem will disappear. The last thing to think about is turning off the Internet. Do you need to be online all the time? What's really annoying is phones online, and it gets an email message and the person gets a notification to know that you received it. That's the worst or Skype message pops up on your phone and the person could see that you read the message. Those message read notifications air so annoying. There's such a curse, and I hate that they got invented. It really is a time and privacy destroyer. It's better to not receive the message than deceit and not reply, because then the person notices with some platforms. For this reason, consider turning off the Internet. Do you need the Internet on when you're writing? Do you need the Internet on when you listen to a podcast? Once you've downloaded, do you need the United on all night while you're sleeping? Considered turning off the Internet and getting back more more of your time for sitting in front of your computer. You completed your research for a project where you're writing a block post. You have your word processor open. You don't need to be online. If you disconnect the Internet, unplug that router. Suddenly, all the distractions disappear. The Internet is a great distracter. I prefer movies to television for a very simple reason. A movie has a beginning and an end. If you sit down in front of cable TV now, you can watch TV 24 hours a day for the next 50 or 100 years, and you'll never see the same thing twice. There will always be something new in front of you. This is how television steals time. There's no beginning and no end. You watch a movie starts with the opening credits, ends with closing credits. You know it's finished. You have to actively decided to fire up another movie. That's why movies air so much better for time control. They have a beginning and an end. The Internet has no beginning and no end even worse than television. You can jump from website to website video to block back to social media jumping from Facebook Twitter instagram to Snapchat all around all these different things. It's very easy toe. Get sucked into mindless entertainment. Find a way to protect their time. Find a way to be efficient about your inner use, efficient about your email use and efficient about your time management and tax scheduling. When you take control of those small areas of your life, when you set specific goals with specific timeframes in front of you, your efficiency will go through the roof. You'll get huge swaths of your time back, and most importantly, you'll get more of your life back. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve. No, master, make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's best seller, serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening. To serve no master podcast, email your questions to podcast at serve. No master dot com and your question with my answer might appear in the next episode.